The Stardust Lounge (6 page)

Against recent notions of eradicating violent fairy tales from children's libraries, it is better, says Bettleheim, to give them imaginary stand-ins with whom they can identify—
for instance, the monsters and evil villains in the Greek myths or the Brothers Grimm.

Through their identification with the Cyclops, his brutal destruction of Odysseus’ crew, children can imaginatively act out their anger at adults, their feelings of paralysis and despair.

At the same time, they can witness Odysseus’ cunning as he plots the Cyclops’ demise, moves his men, in sheepskins, out of the cave to freedom. Children can be both Cyclops and Odysseus, the evil aggressor and the heroic citizen who acts on behalf of others, slays the oppressor, and saves his crew.

Such stories, insists Bettleheim, instill little morality plays inside a child's mind. Rigorous and aggressive toy gun play is a form of such dramas.

But what about real guns? Does my son believe that to handle and trade them, to point one at a girl and threaten her is play? By allowing, even encouraging his childhood war games, did I inadvertently set him up for this confusion?

“It wasn't a real gun,” he sneered the day he was expelled from the Park School for threatening the girl.

“But she
thought
it was,” I argued.

“Well, she's stupid then.”

Is it that Stephen wants, at all costs, to keep on playing, even though the world isn't playing anymore? Is he angry with the world for not playing? Is he using his own enduring belief in play to dupe and frighten? Perhaps he is angry with himself because he still wants to play and the world refuses. And why does the world refuse? Has it grown up and left Stephen?

I take exit 9 off the Mass Pike and drive the back roads toward Amherst. Some years ago I did a poetry reading there and I remember how lovely it was. I'm thinking about Bettleheim's ideas on what he calls an animistic or ego-centered imagination. Children, he argues, possess it. Everything to them is animated, alive.

Bettleheim insists that children cannot understand an abstract universe because such a universe is indifferent to them and this is too frightening to conceive. It enforces their fear that they are powerless.

Better to tell them, he says, that the world rests on the back of a benevolent tortoise than to try to explain the rotation of planets. Not until adolescence can they begin to grasp such abstract concepts.

Could it be, then, that Stephen has fallen into a well between a child's reality that everything is alive, and the encroaching adult view that it is not, or that some things are and some things are not? This is, and that isn't.

Is his anger partly a result, anger that has eroded his empathy and his ability to be loved?

Or has Stephen unwittingly replaced one game with another, replaced innocent play with dangerous play Indeed, why does anyone give up one game for another? Perhaps because the first game has grown tiresome. And why has it grown tiresome? It has become predictable—one always loses at it. Or, on the other hand, one always wins.

In either case, it is no fun anymore. There is no sense of disappointment or reward. In fact, there results a sense of irritation, even anger at having wasted one's time in the first place.

What would make it fun again? If one can't change the outcome of always losing, or always winning, what could
be done to make the game challenging? Well, perhaps one might secretly change the rules.

I'm remembering now how once, flying to Denver, Stephen, Stan, and I played cards to pass the time. Not long into the game, we discovered that eight-year-old Stephen was cheating, hiding cards in his pockets or slipping them up his sleeves. We had offered to him that his cheating rendered the game no fun for Stan and me, to which, to our surprise, he had responded, “Guys, listen. There are no laws in the air …”

The prospect of playing Twenty-one bored Stephen. It was a game he usually lost at because it required him to practice arithmetic, the subject he most hated in school. So he had secretly changed the rules, changed them, at the expense of his opponents, to make the game fun for himself.

“You mean, ‘It's not whether you win or lose but
where
you play the game?” Stan laughed.

“Yep!” Stephen answered as he reshuffled the cards.

Route 9 winds north and west to Amherst, follows the trees, the stone fences, the small ponds frozen, holding the gray afternoon sky. How passionately Stephen played as a child. He used his whole joyful body as he became this or that character in a drama, as he dressed up as the young wizard Ged or, draped in blankets, crawled along the floor, tinfoil sword in hand, Odysseus leading his crew to safety.

And when did this play stop? It was the fall of 1988, the year Charles left for college. Stephen was just eleven. He and I rattled around in that huge apartment, the night and the cold crowding the many ceiling-high windows, everything there suddenly too big for us. Even to each other we seemed smaller, strained, self-conscious.

Our three lives had to that point so powerfully contained the others, and the loss of Charles—even in the face of our joy for his success, his new adventures— opened up bare rooms inside Stephen and me.

In an attempt to close the spaces, I'd rearranged the furniture in the apartment; into the corner of the kitchen moved a small table just big enough for two, laid out a bright tablecloth and a light left burning. Here Stephen and I ate together.

But the enormous rooms around us and the cold night outside bore through. Stephen would fall silent, speaking up only to ask if he could call Charles tonight. Of course. But Charles was often out.

So might so-and-so sleep over? But it was a weeknight, and though Stephen was certainly allowed to telephone, one, two, three friends in the area, the parents of the boys said no.

“How about if we curl up in my bed and I'll read to you?” I'd offer.

“I'm too old to be read to, Mom, remember?” was his reply.

“Awww,” I tried to cajole him, “just one good story for old times’ sake?
You
read to
me
now. You owe me fifty-two thousand and twenty-three stories. Read me ‘For the One Who Set Out to Study Fear.’ I love that one, don't you?”

“I don't feel like it, Mom. Sorry.”

Indeed, about a month or so before, in the middle of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Stephen had declared himself too old to be read to. But for years we had read to each other every night, sometimes for hours.

Though Stephen is exceptionally bright, perceptive,
taught himself to read at three, he possessed then and now a short attention span. At that time doctors, therapists, teachers rarely isolated the problem as attention deficit disorder.

And Stephen was much like his namesake, my youngest brother, Stephen, who had also been a very active, delightful, but challenging little boy. Stephen's behaviors were not unfamiliar to me. He was, to be sure, insatiable about his interests. Physically gifted, he spent the good part of any day on his feet. The one, perhaps the only meditative quality young Stephen possessed was that he was a rapt listener to good stories.

Stories were a way, for instance, to get Stephen to settle down enough to take a bath. Through the years we developed a repertoire of bathtub tales, most if not all focusing on the animals of my childhood.

Stephen's favorite concerned a little black dog named Vick. He loved to hear me tell how one day on a bike ride in the country, I heard puppies whining and barking somewhere nearby. Behind a farmhouse I found a mesh kennel full of small black dogs. When the owner came out of the barn and offered to sell me a pup, I was sorry to tell him, “I don't have any money. But I'd take good care of one…

“You's a little Sugabaka, ain'cha? Live over to the apple orchard? Behind Main?” Stephen laughed at my overwrought affectation of a deep southern Missouri accent.

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

“We-e-11, telly what I'd do. I'd trade one o’ them pups for a bushel of apples from your daddy's trees.”

The tub stories were short, the length of the bath. Afterward,
we'd settle in to read. And I began to see that by reading to him, Stephen's attention could be engaged for longer and longer periods of time. I hoped that eventually this experience would translate into other areas in which he might comfortably sit still.

Stephen leaned close to me, his head just below mine so that I could smell his hair, his sweet child's breath as now and then he asked a question or asked to be reread certain passages. As he became more proficient at reading, we would trade off, he reading one page, I another.

So we devoured fairy tales, myths, narrative poems, ghost stories, science fiction, and, as he grew older, novels. During art period and after school he liked to draw the characters we'd read about. Stephen pinned up his drawings until nearly every wall of his room was covered in pictures of Ged and the flying dragons from
The Wizard of Earthsea,
Long John Silver, Frog and Toad, Odysseus disguised as a sheep, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Cyclops, Cerberus, the Phantom of the Opera.

But the night Stephen decided no more stories, no more Huck Finn, he took down the drawings. He did so ritualistically carefully removing the tacks and putting them in a box, piling the drawings, facedown, under his bed.

Against my attempts to rearrange our lives to minimize his brother's absence, it was as if Stephen decided to represent physically the emptiness he felt, and punish or deprive himself for the pain it caused.

“Be real,” he'd mumble when I suggested how much fun the two of us could have.

“Well, we'll find a way. Honey, look at me. We'll be all right,” I'd offer. That autumn an aspect of Stephen's character
surfaced, as intensely dark as was the light we'd known him by.

“Stephen, you burn so bright!” we'd say when he was younger.

As an infant, Stephen smiled for the first time for his brother. But it wasn't just a smile. Stephen's face lit up in a wide grin. As Charles again and again brought his seven-year-old-face close to his three-week-old brother's, Stephen gurgled, struggled with laughter.

Stephen so captivated us that I forgot the tub water I was running for Charles. Not only did it spill over, but as Stephen smiled and shrieked, water poured down the stairs of our California condominium.

Eleven years later, as suddenly as that first brilliant smile, Stephen had gone dark. He behaved as if he were in mourning: for the loss of the brother who could make him wriggle with laughter, for the threeness of our family, and perhaps for what—as he moved into adolescence—he intuited as the end of childhood.

Even the clothes he chose to wear to school were dark— gray or black sweatshirts, black jeans. Day in, day out, his colorful skateboarding T-shirts, his bright jackets stayed in the drawer as he wore black, brown, black, gray, black.

What might help? How about someone besides Mom to talk to? A therapist named Mike. How about a new skateboard? In spite of the landlords’ complaints, we actually built a four-foot-ramp for it in our living room. And how about trips to see his brother, his grandparents, his cousins? All of the above, none of the above, some—.

Through the autumn of 1988 there were fewer and fewer moments of closeness between Stephen and me. I
felt like Chekhov's darling, Olga, whose obsessive doting on the boy Sasha pushed him further and further away.

“You must try to do your lessons well, darling. Obey your teachers.”

“Oh leave me alone,” Sasha said.

“Sa-a-sha!” she called after him

Where do the guns come from, into the hands of boys like Stephen, boys who for reasons as various and unique as the boys themselves have fallen into that well between the living and the dead world, who have not yet made the leap, as others have, over the gulf, boys who are grieving, bored with the old games, who have been left behind, lost in grief, isolated and angry. And dangerous in their confusion.

“It's easy to get a gun,” Stephen says to me over the phone several nights after my trip to Amherst. He knows his future has once again been placed in my hands. If I don't allow him back to Massachusetts, he may be sent to military school. Perhaps for this reason he is forthcoming.

“It's easy. Mom, listen. People just have ‘em. The right people. Kids know who to go to.”

“But where do
they
get them?” I ask.

“They case cars and houses and steal them. Mom, there are lots of guns out there. All kinds. Sometimes dealers send runners to states where the gun laws are easy. The runners buy the guns and drive them back. Kids have fake IDs that say they're old enough. Or they get them at gun shows. There was a gun show here last weekend. I could buy one in Missouri if I wanted. No problem.”

“But don't parents find them? Doesn't somebody keep tabs? Don't the gun dealers double-check?”

“Mom. Get real. Where have you been? They don't care. They just want their money. Besides, if you get busted you just wait a little while. If you've got the money you can always find someone who'll sell you another one.”

When we hang up, I dial a realtor in Amherst. My conversation with Stephen incites the old panic, but I'm thinking hard. I'm beginning to piece together an idea. Maybe I can't stop Stephen's access to guns, not here in Boston, or Missouri, or Amherst. Nor can I take his grief away. But there might be something I can help him to do.

In my readings of late on children and criminal behavior, I've come across studies that show that kids who are cruel to animals are likely to grow up to commit murder. The statisticians explain that such children lack all empathy for other living things. They cannot identify with the pain they cause. It is likely they have been, themselves, severely abused. But not always. The clinical term for these children is attachment disorder.

Stephen's problem is different in kind, though the statistics are a clue for me. He has never been abused. On the contrary, much loved, perhaps even overly deferred to. He seems to suffer from detachment disorder; i.e. the world is dying away from him, deanimating, but he still feels alive to it. He is mad at it because it won't play anymore, or offers to him the same old games, games he has outgrown and tired of. Still, what else is there? He is mad at himself for still wanting to play